Examine the news stories nationwide about human trafficking — plenty of them exist and new ones pop up each day — and you soon detect a theme. The journalists who write these stories feel obligated to let people know the problem is real, and that it happens in their readers’ neighborhoods.

Not long ago, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, "We are not the Clinton administration." In one particular sense, she is right.

Jewell’s comment was in response to Herbert’s concerns that the Obama administration plans to designate a new Bears Ears national monument in Utah. Republican leaders in the state remember how, 20 years ago, President Bill Clinton stunned them by declaring the Grand Staircase-Escalante

If any government task resembles that of the mythological Greek king Sisyphus, constantly rolling a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again, it is postal reform. That’s why it was surprising this week to hear that Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz is taking it on, and that he is optimistic.

Chaffetz is chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is working on a solution, at least the House’s version of it.

My father’s final days did not fit any textbook definition of a quality life. He suffered from the advanced stages of dementia. He didn’t know who I was. In a rare moment when he seemed somewhat lucid, I asked him if he was scared. The look in his eyes as he nodded still brings tears to my eyes.

And yet he and I shared some of our most tender times together during those days. My stepmother at times would ask me to come to Arizona and stay

Last month, as protests engulfed North Carolina after passage of a bill requiring transgender people to use bathrooms correlating with their birth gender, one of the world’s most popular porn websites inadvertently gave a Utah lawmaker an epiphany.​The site started a boycott of North Carolina in reaction to the law. Anyone identified as having an IP address within its boundaries got nothing but a

I’m not a fan of bringing the Olympics back to Utah, but I am forced to admit that if any place in the world could return sanity to a worldwide spectacle that is spending its way into oblivion, this is the place.

Perhaps the Chicago Tribune said it best in an editorial two years ago. When the United States Olympic Committee decides which city to bid for the 2026 Winter Games, “Salt Lake is the best choice — if only to make the IOC look like fools for rejecting it,” the paper said.

The IOC is the International Olympic Committee, whose members embroiled the 2002 Salt Lake games in a bribery scandal. The Tribune said it wasn’t convinced the IOC had changed, noting its recent penchant to entertain bids from countries

If, like me, you huddled under shelter Monday while rain bounced off the asphalt like thousands of tiny rubber balls, you may be interested in scanning some of the issues Utah’s currents are carrying downstream this spring. Here’s a sampling from my files:​Water, everywhere: Rain can be deceiving. When it comes after years of drought, we forget we live in the nation’s second driest state (behind Nevada), and one of the nation’s fastest growing states (sixth, according to Census figures released late last year).

Let’s start with the premise that just about everyone in Utah wants clean air.

Something about taking a breath, the most fundamental of human needs, erases the conservative impulse to avoid regulations from Washington. And we’ve all lived through those days when the air here is so dense and heavy we have to wipe it from our windshields before heading to work.

My Dad took me to hear President Nixon speak in 1970, and we encountered anti-war protesters outside. The first one I remember being sent to as a reporter involved Palestinians outside the United Nations Building in New York in 1982.

A couple of years later, as a reporter in Las Vegas, I was sent to cover a prolonged and acrimonious strike by unionized hotel workers. There were nightly clashes between chanting protesters and police in riot gear.

Next month marks seven years since I walked to the Federal Building in downtown Salt Lake City to witness something new — a protest by a group calling itself a tea party.

The local gathering was just one of several such parties organized nationwide that day. As I wrote then, many pundits, particularly on the left, dismissed these. Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal’s liberal columnist at the time, questioned the resolve of those involved. He said the rallies would take place, “Unless it rains today …”

Coincidentally, it was snowing as I walked to the Federal Building — one of those intense spring storms where the outdoors becomes a miserable mess. No one seemed to notice. When a speaker suggested she cut her remarks short because of the weather, people shouted, “No!”

At the time, I saw this as a sign of how intensely upset the attendees were with big government.

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The author

Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has 32 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities.